By Agnes Fiilemile and James I. Deutsch
ROOTS TO REVIVAL
Hungary is a small country in Central Europe, roughly
the size of Indiana. Its population is approximately
10 million, but another 2.5 million Hungarians reside
within the seven countries that surround its borders
(Austria, Slovakia, Ukraine, Romania, Serbia, Croatia, and
Slovenia) and another 2 million Hungarians live in other
parts of the world. These people speak Hungarian
known as Magyar (which is also the word that refers
to a person of Hungarian ancestry). The Magyar language
is related to the Ob-Ugric Khanty and Mansi languages
in western Siberia, and was also influenced by ancient
Turkic languages of the Eurasian Steppe, an area from
which the Hungarians migrated to the West as equestrian
semi-nomads. The Magyars' unique language helped
them survive as a cohesive ethnic group and also to
develop a distinctive identity and culture.
When the Magyars arrived in what is now Central Europe
at the turn of the ninth and tenth centuries, they
settled along the rivers of the Carpathian Basin-the
largest being the Danube and Tisza-taking advantage
of the fertile lands. Much of the countryside, including
the flatlands known as the Great Hungarian Plain (east
of the Danube) and the hillier regions known as Trans
danubia (west of the Danube), was then and remains
today very well-suited for animal husbandry and agri
culture, especially for growing grains and vegetables,
as well as fruits that can produce not only a wide variety
of white and red wines renowned for their high quality,
but also the powerful distilled spirits known as palinka.
Maria Serestely from Szek, Transylvania (Romania), wears a local traditional bridal dress and wreath for her wedding in 2010. Photo by Agnes Fulemile, Balassi Institute/Hungarian Cultural Center
11
12
"One of Hungary's most distinctive cultural resources is how dtfferent artists, scholars, and
practitioners have perceived, represented, and reinterpreted the country's dynamic traditions. "
Hungary's history began with the coronation of its first
king , Saint Stephen, in 1000 CE. Major turning points
in its history included invasions by the Mongols in the
thirteenth century and by the Ottoman Turks in the six
teenth and seventeenth centuries. From the sixteenth
century to 1918, seventeen Habsburg rulers occupied
the throne of the Kingdom of Hungary, including the
period of the Austro-Hungarian Empire from 1867 to
1918. Subsequent periods of foreign domination include
those of Nazi Germany during World War II and the Soviet
Union from 1945 until 1989. Hungary, in fact, deserves
some credit for the end of the Cold War: the Hungarian
Revolution of 1956 represented the largest and most
far-reaching armed uprising against the Soviet Union's
monolithic power until the 1980s; and in 1989, Hungary
dismantled the fortifications along its border with Austria
(part of the Iron Curtain), thereby allowing thousands
of East Germans to escape to the West.
Traditional floral decorations adorn the walls of many homes in Kalocsa (southern Hungary), 2011. Kalocsa is famous for its folk traditions, especially costume and embroidery with colorful floral motifs. The Kalocsa region-as the home of embroidery, ornamental painting, traditional dress, and folk dance-was recently included on the list of intangible cultural heritage elements in Hungary. Photo by James Deutsch, Smithsonian Institution
MULTIETHNIC HUNGARY
Throughout its one thousand years of history, Hungary
has been a multiethnic country-drawing and incor
porating new peoples and traditions. The territory has
been an area of contact in Europe's geographic center,
welcoming influences from all directions. The resulting
culture expresses itself in a rich and diverse heritage
of music, dance, costume, arts and crafts, gastronomy,
speech, and even the conventions of naming
(Hungarians place the family name before the given
name, as is the case with most peoples of eastern and
southeastern Asia).
Jewish culture has been present in Hungary since at Least
the tenth century, and reached its cultural and demo
graphic apogee in the Late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, when roughly five percent of the country's
population was Jewish. Hungary's Jewish population
declined initially when the 1920 Treaty of Trianon stripped
Hungary of half of its total population and roughly two
thirds of its territory, including several regions where many
Hungarian Jews had been Living. One generation later,
HUNGARIAN HERITAGE
Painted furniture and textiles were formerly Lajos Busi is a master pott er in Mez6t ur (south- A tradition bearer demonstrates machine embroi-part of a woman's brida l dowry, as in this festive eastern Hungary), a community renowned for its dery at a festival in Kalocsa. room of a farmhouse in the Kalotaszeg region of pottery traditions. Courtesy of Office of Intangible Cultural Heritage, Hungarian Transylvania (Romania) in 2006. Courtesy of Office of Intangible Cultural Heritage, Hungarian Open Air Museum Photo by Agnes Hilemile, Balassi Institute/Hungarian Open Air Museum Cultural Center.
following the cataclysm of the Holocaust in World War II,
the Jewish population fell to less than one percent of
Hungary's total population. In spite of this history, there
remains a thriving community, which contributes greatly
to Hungary's cultural heritage.
Various groups of Rom a people (also known as Romanies
or Gypsies) began arriving in Hungary during the
fifteenth century, and Roma musicians started playing
music for high society and local communities by the
seventeenth century. Roma culture has long contributed
to the richness of musical traditions in Hungary. Today,
more than half a million Roma people reside in Hungary,
making them the largest ethnic minority in the country.
DISTINCTIVE CULTURAL RESOURCES
The richness of Hungarian folk culture found its fullest
expression in the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. In some of the more rural regions, this folk
culture- including folk art, music, dance, costume, and
crafts-remained vibrant well into the late twentieth
century and started to disintegrate only during the
Communist period after World War II. As a result, one of
Hungary's most distinctive cultural resources is the way
in which different artists, scholars, and practitioners
have perceived, represented, and reinterpreted the coun
try's dynamic traditions during the last two centuries.
For instance, the scholarly analysis of Hungarian folk
music began in the late nineteenth century and achieved
spectacular results, thanks to the efforts of composers
Bela Bartok (1881-1945) and Zoltan Kodaly (1882-1967),
who are generally credited as the founders of ethno
musicology in Hungary. They uncovered a layer in
Hungarian folk music based on the pentatonic scale,
which connected it to music from the area between the
Volga River and the Ural Mountains. Bartok and Kodaly
were pioneers in collecting, recording, analyzing, com
paring, and systematizing folk tunes collected among
Hungarians, Romanians, and Slovaks. Later generations of
ethnomusicologists and musicians continued collecting
folk music, resulting in a repertory of Hungarian vocal and
instrumental music with as many as 300,000 melodies.
13
TOP Before the start of a traditional pig slaughtering in Gyimes. Transylvania (Romania), in 2012, Hunor Roman, Botond Kedves, and Csaba Bojte (left to right) play a funeral dirge for the pig.
MIDDLE Although Karoly Antal is the one who slaughtered the pig on a Saturday morning in Gyimes. Transylvania (Romania). in 2012, he remains outside the dining room-out of respect for the animal-while others enjoy a festive meal.
BOTTOM Traditional Hungarian sausages, fish, and ham hocks are sold at the 2012 Festival of Folk Arts outside the Buda Castle in Budapest.
Photos by James Deutsch, Smithsonian Institution
Similarly, the study of dance achieved significant results
in past decades, especially by seminal dance ethnolo
gist Gyorgy Martin (1932 - 1983), who was to Hungarian
dance what Bartok and Kodalywere to Hungarian music.
His efforts in collecting and systematizing motifs found
in Hungarian folk dances shed light on the many types
of historical European dance forms that were preserved
in Hungarian dances, including circle dances, weapon
dances, elaborate Renaissance couple dances, virtuoso
men's solo dances, and the fiery csardas and verbunk
dances, which have inspired Romantic composers like
Ferenc Liszt (1811-1886), Johannes Brahms (1833-1897),
and Hector Berlioz (1803-1869).
REVITALIZING TRADITIONS
Popular interest in folk music and dance traditions was
revived by the so-called tanchaz (dance house) move
ment in the 1970s. This urban grassroots movement
reinvented the institution of the village dance in urban
settings. Young people were searching for traditions
that were "true" and "authentic;· and their interest was
focused on the processes of learning dances that were
A young woman circa 1930 in Kazar (northern Hungary) wears a golden bonnet as part of her Sunday best outfit, while the elder woman wears an everyday blue-dye dress. Courtesy of Museum of Ethnography, Budapest
varied, improvisational, and performed to live musical
accompaniment. They strived to thoroughly understand
the original techn iques, performing styles, and contexts of
the dance and the accompanying vocal and instrumental
musit. Their teachers were remarkable personalities in
rural- areas of Hungary and neighboring countries who
had been able to preserve these trad itions in spite of
twentieth-century modernization.
A similar motivation to preserve traditional Hungarian
handicrafts has provided a boost to a flourishing crafts
revival. The tfmchaz and the crafts revival provided re
freshing alternatives to the mandated, ideologically
controlled Socialist youth movement and forms of enter
tainment of the time. The authenticity of their practices
became not only an act of protest, but also a new channel
for the expression of collective memory and identity.
Since its inception, the tanchaz movement has also been
democratic in the broader sense that it has promoted
respect for and attention to not just Hungarian tradi
tions but also to the trad it ional practices of other ethnic
populations w ithin and beyond Hungary. For instance,
HUNGARIAN HERITAGE
Young adults dress in trad it ional clothing for their First Communion in the Kalotaszeg region of Transylvan ia (Romania) in 2006. In th is most emblematic reg ion of Hungarian folk art, churches encourage the preservation of folk costume for special events and holidays. Photo by Ba lazs Balogh, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Institute of Ethnology
it was instrumenta l in insp iring more thorough explora
tions of traditional Jewish, Roma, Romanian, and Serbian
music and dance.
In a sim ilar fashion, the tanchaz movement has helped
create a shared cultural language and a common de
nominator for ethn ic communities of Hungarians living
abroad-espec ially young people-who are thus able
to connect with each other on an international scale.
There are now dance enthusiasts in places as diverse
as Argentina, Canada, Japan, the Netherlands, Sweden,
Switzerland, and the United States, all of whom appreciate
Hungarian dances beca use of their technical complexity
and improvisational character. As a resu lt, the Hungarian
"dance-house method" of teaching folk dance and music
was recognized in 2011 by UNESCO in its reg istry of best
practices as a paradigm for pass ing on intellectual and
cultural heritage.
Thanks to the transmission of traditional knowledge
from these "last preservers" to the new succeed ing gen
erations, there is now an enormously rich repertoire
and extraordinarily high standard of dance, musical,
15
16
HUNGARIAN HERITAGE
A Roma musician in 1929 poses with his family in Sarkad (southeastern Hungary). Photo by Maar Photo Atelier, courtesy of Museum of Ethnography, Budapest
and crafts knowledge throughout the country. What had started
as an amateur movement thus revolutionized the methods and
concepts of choreographed stage performances, thereby creating
new sensibilities and possibilities for both contemporary and tra
ditional dance. Recent experiments in music, design, and fashion
are reshaping the boundaries and meanings of tradition.
The Hungarian Heritage: Roots to RevivaL program at the
Smithsonian Folklife Festival demonstrates not only the diversity
and authenticity of these contemporary traditions, but also the
significance of the Hungarian folk revival movement worldwide.
Featuring highly skilled masters and apprentices from rural areas,
as well as musicians, dancers, and artisans from more urban set
tings, the program highlights the vitality of this culture, as well
as the strength it derives from the reinterpretation of traditions.
Agnes Fulemile and James I. Deutsch are co-curators of the Hungarian
Heritage: Roots to Revival program. FUlemile is currently director of the
Balassi Institute's Hungarian Cultural Center in New York, and formerly a
research fellow at the Institute of Ethnology of the Hungarian Academy
of Sciences and visiting professor of Hungarian Studies at Indiana Uni
versity. As a program curator at the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and
Cultural Heritage, Deutsch has previously curated Festival programs on
the Peace Corps, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Mekong
River, U.S. Forest Service, and National World War II Reunion.
Performances, presentations, and dance teaching take place at the annual Ttmchaz Festival at the Budapest Sport Arena in 2010. Photo by Agnes Fulemile, Balassi Institute/Hungarian Cultural Center
Fashion designer Melinda Molnar-Madarasz uses Hungarian folk motifs as inspiration for her collections, incorporating not only decorative elements but also traditional structures and values. Her designs encompass women's and men·s wear, as well as footwear. Courtesy of Melinda Molnar-Madarasz
RIGHT Made of broadcloth and decorated with embroidery or applique work, the fancy coat {cifraszur)was the most representative Hungarian festive male garment from the 1820s to the 1930s. Photo by Agnes Fulemile, Balassi Institute/Hungarian Cultural Center